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The fact that I own an Android phone has rarely been more obvious than when I use my iPad–and I try to “gesture type” as if I were using my smaller mobile device’s onscreen keyboard.

The arrival of iOS 8 and its support of third-party keyboards made tracing a path from letter to letter to enter text not just a pointless exercise but a possibility. And with iOS 9’s less buggy support, it’s become a less annoying possibility, but still not a sure thing.

Most of the time, Gboard appears whenever I touch a text field. I can gesture-type with ease (except when I’m holding the tablet sideways), and I could season my prose with emojis and GIFs were I, you know, 20 years younger.

But Apple’s built-in keyboard keeps on surprising me by resurfacing on its own. To get a better sense of how often that happens, I tried taking notes on this behavior this week and reached three conclusions:

• The system works more often than I gave it credit for. The departures from the norm stick out, but keeping track of them made me realize how rare they are.

• In certain cases, the stock keyboard shows up because it’s supposed to. As an Apple tech-support note explains, iOS’s keyboard automatically takes over in secure data-entry fields like the password dialogs of the App Store and Amazon apps.

• In rare occasions, iOS does get confused about keyboards for no apparent reason. A tap of the address bar in Safari would sometimes invoke the stock keyboard instead of Gboard, while the Duolingo language-tutorial app proved itself capable of alternating between the iOS and Google keyboards in a single session.

It’s tempting to blame Apple, given the iffy quality of much of its software. But I can’t rule out this being Google’s fault. I mean, as good as Gboard is, I still had to do a copy-and-paste job from a Web site to enter the symbol that best captures my latest diagnosis of the situation:

Sometime in the last year or two, my least favorite three-word phrase in all of computing became “Safari Web Content.” That’s the component of Apple’s browser that appears red in OS X’s Activity Monitor app–normally, you see the address of the Web page being displayed by this process–when it stops responding and starts locking up the rest of the Mac.

My usual routine when I see OS X once again seize up is to flip over to Activity Monitor–which sometimes requires a wait for Safari to loosen its death grip on the system–and start force-quitting the stuck Safari Web Content processes, if I’m not looking at a screenful of them. If I do see a screenful, I’ll force-quit the whole damn browser.

This usually leads to lengthy bouts of swearing, about which I’m getting increasingly embarrassed. Yes, I work from home and nobody is around to object to a stream of curses (which was not the case in the Post’s newsroom; sorry, Posties), but I also realize I’m being an idiot. The computer has no feelings; it doesn’t care how many f-bombs I direct at it. And all this nerd rage can’t be good for my health anyway.

So while I wait and wait for Apple’s developers to bring their browser to heel, I am trying to learn to chill. To slowly inhale and exhale and to listen to the sound of my breathing, to look up from the screen so I can gaze at the trees and the sky outside, to stand up and stretch, to in general not give in to the Dark Side. Do you have any advice about how I might better do that? Please share it in the comments.

I spent two days this week working in large buildings in D.C., as if I had a full-time job or something. The reasons: Access’s Crypto Summit and the D.C. chapter of the Internet Society’s Internet Governance Forum USA. Neither conference gave me anything I had to write about on the spot, but things I learned at each wonkfest will almost certainly wind up in my coverage later on.

Comcast’s announcement over the weekend of this streaming-only TV service left some key questions unanswered–like, would you save money on this and a standalone Comcast Internet subscription compared to Comcast’s current bundle of broadband, local channels and streaming HBO?–so I tried to address those concerns in this extra post.

Amazon turned 20 years old on Tuesday, and I marked the occasion by using my regular column spot to assess its footprint on tech policy over those two decades. The verdict, based on conversations with people across the political spectrum: It’s been more of a follower than a leader, and in some cases it’s been part of the problem. Do the 100-plus comments mean my verdict set off an extended debate? No, they mean a lot of people wanted to complain about Amazon’s delivery times.

A couple of weeks ago, I belatedly decided that it was time to catch up on my RSS reading–and try to stay caught up on my Web feeds instead of once again letting the unread-articles count ascend to four-digit altitudes.

After a couple of days of reacquainting myself with using various RSS apps to read the latest posts at my designated favorite sites, I had another overdue realization: Much as Winston Churchill said of democracy, RSS remains the worst way to keep up with what’s new on the Web, except for all the others.

“Really Simple Syndication,” a standard through which sites can automatically notify an RSS client about each new post, is old-in-Web-years and unfashionable. But it retains a few core advantages over its alleged replacements. One is control: my RSS feed only shows the sites I’ve added, not somebody else’s idea of what I should know. Another is what I’ll call a tolerance of time: A site that only posts an update a week is less likely to get lost when it occupies its own folder in the defined space of my RSS feed.

The third, maybe most important feature: Nobody owns RSS. When Google shut down Google Reader, I could export my subscriptions and move them to any other RSS host. I went with Feedly and have since been contentedly using that site’s free iOS and Android apps and the third-party Mac program ReadKit ($6.99 then, now $9.99).

I know many people now employ Twitter as their news feed, but I can’t make that work. I love Twitter as a social space, but in practice it’s been a miserable way to get the news. That’s not the fault of the service or its interface, but because it’s full of humans who often get excited about the same things that are really important to them in particular. The result: constant outbreaks of banter about inconsequential-to-normal-people developments like the addition of custom emoji to a chat-room app.

Twitter does help me learn about things happening outside of my usual reading habits, alerts me to breaking news hours faster than RSS and provides an incredibly useful way to talk to readers and hear from them. And yet the more I lean on Twitter as a communications channel, the worse it functions as a news mechanism.

(Facebook… oh, God, no. The News Feed filter I need there most would screen out all updates sharing outside content, so I’d only see things written, photographed or recorded by friends instead of an endless stream of links to content posted in the hope that it will go viral.)

Google Now’s cards for “Research topics,” “Stories to read,” and “New content available” can serve as an RSS substitute in some contexts. Unlike RSS, they’re not stuck with your last settings change and instead adjust to reflect where Google sees your attention wandering and where readers have clicked at the sites you visit. And unlike Twitter, these cards don’t get overrun with me-too content.

But relying on Google Now puts me further in Google’s embraces, and I think I give that company enough business already. (I’m quasi-dreading seeing cards about “RSS” and “Google Now” showing up in Google Now, based on my searches for this post.) It’s also a proprietary and closed system, unlike RSS.

I do appreciate Now as a tool to help me decide what sites deserve a spot in my RSS feed–and, by virtue of Feedly’s recent integration with Google Now, as a way to spotlight popular topics in my RSS that merit reading before others.

As I was going over this reevaluation of my info-grazing habits, I realized that I haven’t even gotten out of the habit of using bookmarks in my browsers. Yes, bookmarks! They remain a major part of my experience of Safari and the mobile version of Chrome–thought not, for whatever reason, the desktop edition.

Mine are embarrassingly untended, littered with lapsed memberships and defunct sites. But they also let me get to favorite sites by muscle memory and without excessive reliance on auto-complete (less helpful for going straight to a particular page on a site) and search (like I said, Google gets enough of my time already).

And my bookmarks would work better if there weren’t so many of them. I really should edit them today… right after I see if my signature file needs new ASCII art.

I’ve been looking forward to writing this column for several years, and when the end of Microsoft’s support for Windows XP finally arrived I found it strangely enjoyable to revisit stories I’d written five and 10 years ago about XP. I’ve since heard from a few readers who say they prefer XP to Windows 7 or 8 not just because they need to run legacy apps or don’t want to buy a new PC, but because XP is easier. I’m wary of questioning a reader’s subjective judgment, but… um, no.

(Screenshot shows how the story renders in a copy of Internet Explorer 6 in Windows XP. Don’t ask how I sourced that image.)

4/8/2014: Windows XP, WTOP

I talked for a few minutes about the end of XP support and what users of that fossilized malware magnet of an operating system could do to stay safe.

To judge from the low number of Facebook and Twitter shares displayed next to this story, almost nobody read my attempt to concisely how the intersection of browser security models with Web apps that look and work like local ones can lead to dysfunctional results. I’ll try to find a more enticing topic next week.

My ongoing campaign to prop up the airline industry led me to Denver this weekend, where I moderated one panel and attended others at Free Press’s National Conference for Media Reform, wrote one of the pieces listed below, escaped the conference for a few hours Friday to see the Rockies’ home opener, and caught up with the old friends I stayed with.

I wrote this in part to push back against the blood-feud school of tech journalism, in which every action by Google (or Apple, Facebook, Microsoft or Samsung) must be viewed as a stab at one or all of its rivals. I think Google forking the Apple-driven WebKit browser-engine code shouldn’t be that bad for Apple, may be good for Chrome users–and is certainly helpful for reducing the threat of a Web monoculture.

I led a discussion about the factors that lead people to drop cable or satellite TV service–and make it hard for competing video providers to enter the market–with lawyer and lobbyist Gene Kimmelman, author and activist Susan Crawford, Netflix public-policy director Corie Wright and Free Press research director Derek Turner. If video surfaces of our chat, I’ll add a link here.4/25/2013: The organizers added an audio recording of the panel to the session page linked above.

I screwed up this post by not mentioning Facebook’s good implementation of the security measure I’d lauded last week. The social network had added two-step verification back in May of 2011, but I’d missed the news that day–the start of a long weekend on vacation and mostly offline–and ever since. After two readers set me straight on my Facebook page, I e-mailed corrected sentences to my (capable and forgiving) editor while waiting to board my flight home from Denver, and she had the piece updated before they’d shut the cabin door.

A slow Monday that I’d hoped would ease my way back into a semi-normal workweek was interrupted by a note from an old Post colleague–specifically, somebody in the IT department–with the never-good subject line of “virus?”

The security guys are reporting that someone is attempting to logon to VPN with your old credentials.

I replied saying that it was probably something spurious unless it was coming from the IP address my home currently had assigned from Verizon. He wrote back to say “turns out that IP is what is pinging the VPN server.”

Well, crap.

I updated my Mac’s ClamXav malware-scanner for the first time in months and got it started on a tedious inspection of my Mac, then downloaded the trial version of a network monitor called Little Snitch.

The virus scan found nothing, and Little Snitch didn’t report any oddball apps trying to send out data either. I also checked the settings of apps that I’d once configured to log into the newsroom remotely, but found nothing there.

Then I thought to try searching for the Post VPN address in Little Snitch’s network monitor. That revealed that Safari–to be exact, its WebProcess component–had pinged it only a few hours ago. A search for that address in Safari’s bookmarks and history located an old bookmark for the site that I’d misplaced in an unrelated, rarely-opened folder. Since deleting that, Little Snitch hasn’t recorded any more access attempts, and I haven’t gotten any other reports of those from the Post’s IT people.

WebProcess itself seems remarkably undocumented on Apple’s customer and developer sites, aside from references to it by users in the company’s tech-support forums. A further inquiry confirmed my initial hunch that this process updates Safari’s “Top Sites” view of pages you’ve visited recently–how else will the browser know to provide current previews of them?

What I still don’t get is why WebProcess would have kept on checking a site I hadn’t visited in close to two years–and which I don’t remember seeing in Top Sites anytime since. But I’ve witnessed enough weird behavior lately from individual Apple apps that I can’t put this past Safari… which is to say, I hope that’s all this is and that I haven’t missed something else.